


statements and star charts

by thepensword



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, I might add a handful of other characters not sure yet, Minkowski slamming the door in Someone’s face, heavy spoilers for wolf 359, i have...no clue how to tag this fic, jon being nosy, lovelace drop kicking a fear manifestation, set during tma s3, this fic will among other things feature
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-25 05:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21910879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepensword/pseuds/thepensword
Summary: Statement of Douglas Eiffel regarding his time spent aboard the USS Hephaestus station, in orbit around red dwarf star Wolf 359. Original statement given January 18, 2016. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.
Comments: 22
Kudos: 115





	1. Statement of Marian Fourier

**Author's Note:**

> hello hello welcome to my self indulgent crossover fic! things to know:
> 
> for WOLF 359: there will be VERY heavy spoilers so if you haven't listened to it, be aware. also! timelines got scooted back a year or two to make things fit better.
> 
> for THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES: this fic takes place sometime in season 3, in that small window of time post-Gerry and pre-Unknowing. I can't guarantee there won't be spoilers beyond that, though, largely because I can't remember what happened when.
> 
> Content warnings will appear at the beginning of each chapter. None apply for this one.

_Statement of Marian Fourier, regarding the death of her sister. Original statement given December 6th, 2015. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins._

* * *

Victoire always loved the stars. And sappy romance novels, and purple macarons, and the sound of crickets in the evening, but most of all she loved the stars. She loved the _sky._ She’d spend hours outside, just staring up into the darkness. When we were young, and our parents put us to bed, Vic would open our window and climb out onto the roof, just to sit there and look.

I never really understood it, even though I tried, for her sake. I was always more focused on my writing. But it was always clear that Victoire loved the sky more than anything. I used to joke that she loved outer space more than she loved me, except sometimes I’d wonder if that was really the truth, after all. Something in the way she laughed when I’d say that...the way she was always distracted, looking up into the heavens. Needless to say, none of us were at all surprised when she decided to go into astrophysics.

Victoire was brilliant. She flew through university at the top of her class and was offered a teaching position, but that was no good for her. She wanted to see space first hand. So when Goddard Futuristics sent her the job offer, of course she accepted.

The mission was fairly simple. A small research team was to be sent out to a different star—a red dwarf called Wolf 359. It boggled my mind to think about something that far away. It freaked me out a bit, to be honest, still does, but Vic loved the idea. I wonder if she ever changed her mind. 

The station was called the USS Hephaestus. The crew seemed friendly enough from what Vic told me—I know for a fact she hit it off with the other astrophysicist. I teased her about that, back when we were still getting their messages. It was always Kuan this, Kuan that, Kuan and I think there’s going to be a stellar flare tomorrow—etc., etc. Seven and a half light years away and I could still see her smile when she talked about the way the stellar wind looks as it scatters across the window of the observation deck. 

I don’t know when we realized something was wrong. Maybe it was when Mace Fisher died, maybe it was when Kuan Hui got sick; all we knew was Victoire sounded more and more tense in her messages, and that the messages came with much less frequency. It was clear that something was wrong when they stopped entirely, but no matter how much we asked, Goddard wouldn’t tell us anything. They said they were handling it, and not to worry. Communications equipment breaks down all the time. It was perfectly normal.

And so we waited. And then they told us she was dead, that everyone was dead, and handed us a check so large that it would cover all of our expenses for the rest of our lives. Hush money, I guess. Not that anyone would listen if we _did_ try to start anything—the whole mission had been swept under the rug, and Goddard has very good lawyers, apparently. We never heard from the families of the rest of the crew, either. I went looking once, you know—thought I might find them so I could, I don’t know, have someone who understood? See my sister again through the families of the people she’d worked with? I’m not sure. I was just...it hurts, you know? Losing someone like that, and watching the rest of the world forget her. But Goddard wouldn’t give me their addresses and none of them lived in the UK and I just don’t have the funds to go on some grand quest to find people I’ve never met, people who might not want to see me at all.

So it sucked. It was really, really messed up, and my entire family was heartbroken, and my sister was gone, but at least that was the end of it. No more worrying, no more fear. Just cold certainty that she was gone. Or at least, that’s what I thought. And then Isabel Lovelace showed up on my doorstep.

Lovelace was the captain of the Hephaestus mission. According to Victoire, she was funny, smart, strong as hell, and completely terrifying. She was a good leader, for the most part, even if she tended to get into nonstop arguments with her second in command. And she was dead. She was dead, because everyone on that mission was dead. Except there she was on my doorstep, three years after she was supposed to have died. 

She didn’t look how I expected. I’d seen pictures, and I must have met her at the meet and greet they held for family and close friends before the launch, but after almost seven years I thought she’d be older. The woman calling herself Lovelace looked like she’d barely at aged at all. She wasn’t completely unchanged, sure—she had new scars and huge bags under her eyes like she was exhausted—but she looked as young as the day they left. She asked if she could come in and I let her, asked her if she wanted tea or anything, and she said no. She sat down on my couch and looked at me like _I_ was the ghost.

“How are you alive?” is the first thing I said. I don’t think I meant to be so blunt, but it just sort of came out that way. I was reeling, honestly. If she wasn’t dead, what about Victoire? And why now? It had been years. Why, suddenly, was she back? 

“It’s a long story,” she said. “It’s...complicated.”

I shook my head and told her that I had nothing else planned for the rest of the day, that she should get on with it and tell me everything. Had Goddard lied to us? Was Victoire dead? She looked sad when I asked that, and I knew even before she said it—no, Victoire was not secretly still alive somehow. She was a corpse somewhere light years from earth and I would never see her again. 

Lovelace looked sad when she told me that, but I remember thinking she also looked so incredibly guilty, like it was her fault somehow. Maybe I shouldn’t have but I prodded her to tell me exactly what had happened up there. How was she back? Why wasn’t she dead?

She told me, more or less, but I could tell she was holding a lot back. Something about the science officer going rogue and powerful superviruses and human experimentation and evil corporate conspiracies and being abandoned to die up there. She said Elias Selburg had killed them off one by one but that she had pretended to die and hid up there until they sent the second mission up. There was a second mission, by the way—I remember hearing about it, but honestly at the time I was still too messed up about Victoire to care. I remember feeling angry about it. The first mission had met with catastrophic failure and what, they were just going to sweep it under the rug and try again? Did they even tell the new crew about their predecessors? Did the new crew even care?

The way Lovelace told it, they hadn’t known. The new crew was smaller, and Selburg was on it again, except now he called himself Alexander Hilbert and pretended to be harmless. It was the same pattern as before, except this time she already knew about it. She got really vague here; something about coming out of hiding and helping the crew to deal with Selburg, something about hijacking a supply ship full of special operatives coming to kill them all, something about a crusade to destroy Goddard for what they’d done to her. It was a bit of a blur, honestly. It was a lot to take in, and I was sure she wasn’t telling me the truth, or at least not all of it. She was hiding something, and we both knew it, but neither of us wanted to say anything.

The thing is, it doesn’t make sense. How could she survive up there for so long without anyone knowing? How did she trick Selburg into thinking she was dead? Why hadn’t she aged? If Selburg had started up human trials with his supervirus again, how come none of the second crew even showed symptoms? I asked her, and she just shook her head, and then I got angry. I can’t really say why I got so angry, but I did, and I said, “Well, how come you got to survive, and not Victoire? If she had to die, how come you got to live?"

Lovelace sort of smiled at me then, all sad and broken. Her eyes were like the view through a telescope on a cloudy night. Empty, and distant. She got up to leave, but before she did she said something that chilled me to my core.

“How do you know I did?”

* * *

_Statement ends._

_This statement is...confusing. The involvement of a deep space mission and a forgotten crew draws disturbing parallels with the Daedalus mission, but the account given of Captain Lovelace seem more reminiscent of the work of the Stranger, while the mention of a supervirus could be the work of the Corruption. The second crew of the Hephaestus mission did in fact make it back to earth in late 2015, when they crashed a ship directly into the Gulf of Mexico. I had Martin do some digging; it looks like the crew made quite a stink and eventually managed to get a large settlement from Goddard Futuristics. More hush money, I suppose, but they don’t seem to be satisfied. There have been a number of incidents involving break-ins at Goddard facilities resulting in either theft of data or the complete destruction of the facility by use of extremely professionally-placed explosives. Some digging uncovered that among the mission’s survivors was Daniel Jacobi, a former demolitions expert working on contract with the military until an incident that led to his being fired. I would assume he and Lovelace are behind these Goddard facility incidents, in which case they have both been very busy. I wonder if the Desolation has any involvement in this?_

_After some further digging I discovered a second statement regarding the Hephaestus mission, this one taken from the communications officer, Douglas Eiffel. I will be looking into that statement next._

_End recording._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was a short statement and a short chapter. the rest will get longer from here. thanks for reading!
> 
> leave a comment or visit me on [tumblr](https://thepensword.tumblr.com)/  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/thepensw0rd)


	2. Statement of Douglas Eiffel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BIG spoiler warning for Wolf 359 on this one.

_ Statement of Douglas Eiffel regarding his time spent aboard the USS Hephaestus station in orbit around red dwarf star Wolf 359. Original statement given January 18, 2016. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins. _

* * *

It’s...I don’t really know where to begin. I mean, it’s not really my story to tell? Well, it is, I guess, kinda, but...it’s Eiffel’s story. I mean, I’m Eiffel, obviously, Douglas Eiffel! That’s me. Hi. But...Officer Eiffel. This is his, not mine. Not really.

Sorry. Sorry, I’m doing this wrong. I should...okay. Okay. Sorry. Um. The amnesia hasn’t been...great. I’ll start over. I’ll, uh, I’ll start like he did, I guess. If I copy him sometimes I remember things. Not a lot, just—flashes. Lightbulb memories. Hera says it’s not really possible to  _ completely  _ wipe my brain, just that there’s like...memory banks, or something, and the wires got cut. Like I’m on one side of a big gap and the memories are on the other side and all the bridges fell away so I can’t quite reach them but sometimes if I look  _ really, really hard,  _ I can get half a glimpse. She says we can probably slowly work on building those bridges again. I’m...not sure I want to. Well, I don’t know. It’s complicated. Officer Eiffel wasn’t...he wasn’t...he wasn’t the best person.

Anyway.

What was I saying? Oh, right. I’ll start like him. Um. ‘This is the audio log of former Communications Officer Doug Eiffel, currently sitting inside the Magnus Institute, in London. It’s super freaky in here and everyone talks like it’s Harry Potter, and’—oh. Harry Potter. That...that wasn’t there, before. I—

Sorry. Let me try again. 

We’ve been back on earth for, what, a little over half a year now? We’ve settled in a bit, by now. I’m living with Renee and Dominik—sorry, that’s Renee Minkowski and Dominik Koudelka, I know you said something about full names—and Hera, of course. We wired her into the house; the wifi, bluetooth speakers, cameras, even the kitchen appliances, and let me tell you, you don’t know fear until you’ve woken up to the blender turning on at random at 3am because she’s messing around with it—sorry. Got distracted. Uh. Isabel—that’s Isabel Lovelace—stays with us sometimes, but she’s pretty much always on the move. Says she’s got people to visit, and that she’s gonna tear Goddard apart brick by brick. Honestly, I believe her. She’s pretty scary. Same story with Jacobi, kinda. He mostly does his own thing, though. 

It’s not all bad. I saw my daughter again, apologized for who I was before, but it’s not...it kinda rings hollow when you can’t even remember what you did. Or who she is. Or who  _ you  _ are, or what even happened up there, because all you have to go on is these stupid recordings and they’re  _ really  _ inconsistant sometimes and past-you talks like he barely knows  _ English  _ and he’s kind of an asshole but from what you  _ can  _ tell it seems really bad—sorry. Got off track again. Uh, I’ll start over, one more time.

The first thing I remember is waking up on the station. My head hurt like you wouldn’t believe and I had no idea where I was, but I do remember I was saying Hera’s name. I didn’t actually remember that until later, and I don’t know what I was going to say, but it’s something, right? Renee was there, leaning over me, and I didn’t know who she was but I knew she was important and she looked  _ real  _ bad. She was holding onto her stomach and there was...a  _ lot  _ of blood. Isabel was behind her, slumped against the wall and barely conscious. She didn’t look too good either.

Jacobi’s the one who got us out, in the end. The station was shaking around something awful and Renee passed out pretty soon after I woke up and I sure didn’t know what to do. He got us all on the Urania and into the medbay and we headed home. And...they said it doesn’t matter, who I was before, but they gave me the logs anyway.

If I hadn’t literally been in a spaceship at the time, I’m not sure I would’ve believed it all. Even then, it was still ridiculous. But Isabel got stronger and stronger the further away from the star we got, and one time I thought I saw her eyes glow just a bit. And on top of that, it just...it all made sense, somehow, like somewhere deep down underneath all we’d done to stop Pryce, I knew it was all true.

Renee worries about that, by the way. The remembering. She wants Eiffel back, it’s pretty obvious even if she won’t say it, but she’s also worried about what would happen if Pryce remembers. I can tell. I mean, the woman is decades older than should be possible and she  _ was  _ kind of part of an evil super-plot to control and or eradicate all of humanity, so who knows what she could do if she started to remember her previous nefarious intentions. Cutter’s dead, obviously, but even without him…

Sorry, this is probably confusing. I don’t know how much longer I can talk about this, though. It’s...it’s hard. If I think about it too much I get those flashes and those can hurt pretty bad sometimes and sometimes even if I don’t actually  _ remember _ , I get the associated trauma and...let’s just say it can get pretty ugly. I’ll just...summarize, I guess?

We got sent to space. We were supposed to be a research mission. Goddard lied to us. We were never supposed to come home. Dr. Hilbert used me as a labrat for his evil supervirus. Aliens replayed our music and when Hilbert found out he went all murder-y on us and then the star turned blue and the aliens stole my voice and were super cryptic and weird and...Captain Lovelace came back from the dead except it turned out she’s...not the Captain Lovelace who died in the first place. Jacobi had a clone too, except his died, and we didn’t know anything about this until Kepler shot Isabel and she got better, and we found out we weren’t the first by any means. I got launched into space and almost died. Several times. Like, way more times than any one person should ever realistically get launched into space. Did you know fast-freezing yourself over and over makes your fingernails fall off? Then Cutter showed up and there was a lot of mind control and freaky deaky end-of-the-world bullshit and then Renee and Isabel killed him and Hera and I stopped Pryce and that was it. I forgot everything and we went home.

That’s it. That’s the story. Eiffel’s story. My—

Damnit.

I’m done. That’s all. Can I go now?

* * *

_ Statement ends. _

_ I’m beginning to wonder if the Hephaestus mission is the work of the Spiral purely because of how confusing these statements are. The details given in this statement are...vague, to say the least. It did manage to bring some new information to the table, mainly in the form of further information on the being calling itself Isabel Lovelace. At this point, it is almost undeniable that the Stranger was in play here, especially given the new information regarding a double of Daniel Jacobi and the so-called aliens reportedly stealing Eiffel’s voice. Again, Hilbert’s work sounds like the Corruption, and the situation in general reeks of the Vast, but the Stranger seems to be the strongest contender for the controlling factor at work on the Hephaestus mission. _

_ Additionally, Eiffel’s amnesia is interesting. He gave no explanation in his statement as far as I can tell, though his rambling was so directionless that it’s hard to say. There’s little to no information on it that I can find; it seems the crew of the Hephaestus was very cagey about the details after their return to earth, and Goddard Futuristic’s desire to cover up their tracks is certainly not making things any easier. _

_ There is one exciting piece of information, though. It seems that through some absurd coincidence, the mission’s commander, Renee Minkowski, is currently on vacation with her husband in Europe. Martin found records of plane tickets from DC to Paris, and then train tickets from there throughout various locations across the continent. He also found record of a recent reservation at an AirBnB in London under the name of Dominik Koudelka—Minkowski’s husband. I’ve sent him to go investigate for any further possible connections with the Stranger. Even if it turns out to be nothing it could be...nice, to poke at something less sinister than the Circus. And...perhaps there will be some new information on how to avoid another Not-Sasha incident. If Eiffel was able to identify both Lovelace and Jacobi’s double as copies, perhaps there are ways to overcome the Stranger’s trickery? _

_ I...I hope so. Martin bought a polaroid camera a few weeks ago and has been taking pictures...often. Of all of us. He left an envelope of them on my desk yesterday.  _

_ Maybe I should thank him. I—oh. What’s this? _

_ Oh, right. _

_ End recording. _

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we'll be breaking away from the statement format soon. bear with me!
> 
> drop a comment or visit me on [tumblr](https://thepensword.tumblr.com)/[twitter](https://twitter.com/thepensw0rd)


	3. Email

_ You have one (1) new email. _

**To:** Jonathan Sims [ _jsims@maginstitute.org_ ]

**From:** Unknown Sender [ _hera@noneofyourbusiness.org_ ]

**Subject:** hi

Dear Mr. Sims,

I noticed you digging. Stop doing it. Leave us the hell alone.

Thank you! 

Hera

  
  



End file.
